The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

With latest alarm failure, iPhone users able to sleep in

January 2, 2011 | 9:00
am

IPhone users were left sleeping this weekend as the Apple Inc. device had its third alarm-clock failure.

A fault may prevent one-time alarms from working on Jan. 1 and 2, the Cupertino, California-based company said in a statement Saturday. Recurring alarms will still function on those dates and all alarms will operate from Jan. 3, according to Apple, which is the world’s third-most valuable publicly traded company.

Calls outside business hours by Bloomberg News to Apple’s offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong, as well as to its media line and to a spokeswoman in California, weren’t returned.

A defect caused some iPhone alarm settings in Europe to go off an hour late on Nov. 1, failing to adjust automatically to the change as most countries in Europe switched to standard time from daylight savings. Similar problems affected iPhone users in Australia and New Zealand in September, causing their alarms to go off an hour early in the Southern Hemisphere, according to AppleInsider.com.

Apple shares climbed 53% in New York Stock Exchange Composite trading in 2010, following a 147% surge in 2009. The stock closed at $322.56 on Dec. 31, giving the company a market value of $296 billion. That’s behind only Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp. and Beijing-based PetroChina Co., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

--Bloomberg

Photo: An Apple iPhone 4 lies on the floor next to a bed in St. Gallen, Switzerland, on Jan. 1, 2011. Credit: Ennio Leanza / EPA